This is a story about an international couple raising and home educating three young boys on a small island in Japan, half living in buses, engaged in organic, self-sufficient farming in the middle of a mountain forest while dealing with climate, cultural, and personal challenges. These pages are about pretty much anything and everything all guided by our family motto, Taking Chances, Making Changes, Being Happy. Thank you very much for joining us on our ongoing crazy adventure.

Comments or questions about this blog?....message me at Facebook.
 
AGROFOREST        STORY        THOUGHTS        ABOUT US
Home - Thoughts - America - Censorship and dismantling of the EPA is morally and ethically wrong
EPA....Goodbye

The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, as we knew it, is on its way to being nothing more than a few pages in the history books….provided President Donald Trump even allows those pages to be written. Trump has been all too obvious in his intentions to dismantle the agency and now he has taken drastic steps towards its demise.
EPA climate change data....I COPIED ALL OF IT

I spent a couple of weeks and copied the EPA climate change date. This data will be used as a benchmark to ascertain the level at which Trump and his administration will censor and hide this information from the American public. This includes text, images, graphs, and tables. The data is now uploaded in a very readable and user friendly form to this site. You would think there is no reason to do this, since no doubt, all climate scientists from the EPA, NASA, NOAA, are all rushing to make backup copies of the climate change pages. You might also be thinking this project is pretty anal, even for me, but this is important.
Go to the climate change pages on the Fun Easy English site....
Environmental Destruction Agency

Update: February 18, 2017

Hey folks. Scott Pruitt was confirmed as the new Secretary of the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency. Be sure to pay very close attention to the EPA site https://www.epa.gov/ over the next few weeks. No doubt the links to the climate change data will mysteriously disappear. BTW they wasted no time putting Scott Pruitt on the home page and deleting the former acting director. The environmental screwing has begun.
The Fox

On December 7, 2016, then President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. The nomination was reviewed during hearings held by the members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, then referred to the full Senate for a vote. Referring to the nomination, Pruitt said, "I intend to run this agency in a way that fosters both responsible protection of the environment and freedom for American businesses."

In his confirmation hearing, Pruitt was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders what actions has taken about the regular Oklahoma earthquakes in his capacity as attorney general. Pruitt responded, "I've acknowledged I'm concerned." Sanders commented, "If that's the kind of administrator you're going to be for the EPA — you've had a record-breaking number of earthquakes and you acknowledge you're concerned — you're not going to get my vote." Sanders asked Pruitt, "Why is the climate changing?" "I'm asking you a personal opinion." "My personal opinion is immaterial to the job of the…" Pruitt started to say. Sanders interjected: "Really? You are going to be the head of the agency to protect the environment, and your personal feelings about whether climate change is caused by human activity and carbon emissions is immaterial?"

Several sources, including The New York Times and The Independent, have described Pruitt as a climate change denier. He said of global warming that "that debate is far from settled" and "We don't know the trajectory, if it is on an unsustainable course. Nor do we know the extent by which the burning of fossil fuels, man's contribution to that, is making this far worse than it is." With other state attorneys general, he has sued to fight the EPA's Clean Power Plan and regulations on methane emissions.

Pruitt calls himself "a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda." Pruitt's office has come under fire for failing to comply with Oklahoma's mandated disclosure of the costs of contracts that he had made with outside counsel. These included the expenses involved in litigating multiple federal suits against the EPA. It lost those which challenged the EPA’s regulatory authority over mercury and other toxins, as well as pollutants responsible for creating regional atmospheric haze. It challenged the manner in which EPA sued unrelated entities and for what Pruitt termed the agency's "sue and settle" practices. Pruitt further sued and lost after the EPA declined to provide extensive records in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, a request the federal judge hearing the case found to be overly broad and economically burdensome. As a result of Pruitt's criticism of the organization that he is expected to administer, Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, described the nomination as being "like the fox guarding the henhouse."

Over the years, Pruitt has received $270,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.
EPA Blackout

Then on January 24th, a mere 4 days after being sworn in as president, Trump imposed a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding new contracts or grants. Emails sent to EPA staff since his inauguration on Friday and reviewed by the Associated Press detailed the specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency’s social media accounts. Trump — who at a meeting with automakers Tuesday insisted he was “an environmentalist” — also ordered a “temporary suspension” of all new business activities at the department, including issuing task orders or work assignments to EPA contractors. The orders are expected to have a significant and immediate impact on EPA activities nationwide.

THIS IS A VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION

The Supreme Court has ruled that public employee speech involving matters of public concern constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment. This is an important right, because, as the Supreme Court has conceded, government employees are often in the best position to learn the deficiencies in the government agencies for which they work. It is important to allow government employees to make these deficiencies open to the community, so the public can debate how to improve them.

A day later, on January 25th, things got even worse as the Trump administration instructed the EPA to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama's climate change initiatives. He is not only erasing Global Warming information, he is erasing all climate change information….they are completely different in case you did not know.

The American public….AND THIS MEANS YOU….is quickly entering an era of unprecedented censorship and scientific denial. Trump is forgetting an important point. Trump, his team, and all of those heading agencies like the EPA are PUBLIC SERVANTS. This means they work for us and are obligated to report any aberrations in any federal agency. The complete deletion of years of scientific research, and removing said research from public access is morally and ethically wrong.
EPA Climate Change Data

Seeing all of this coming, towards the end of December, about a month before the inauguration, I began to copy materials from the EPA website related to climate change and global warming. This acquisition process of important environmental data went into high gear once Trump made moves to quiet the agency. Within two days, I was able to copy most of the important climate change information, along with any relevant graphics, all of which were safely stored on the servers of this site.

While I was copying and pasting, I kept asking myself why I was doing this. After all, the EPA scientists, and their colleagues at NASA, NOAA, and other related agencies, were no doubt making backup copies of this information. I guess it really bothered me to think this data, while backed up somewhere, would no longer be available to the public. This meant years of scientific research, by dedicated scientists, paid for with my tax dollars, would be sent into the abyss of scientific denial. This was totally unacceptable.

Scientific research, and the results of the that research, should always be available to the public for review, discussion, debate, and to be used to make policy decisions. Keeping that information from the public is a crime against science, and a crime against what America and our constitution stands for.

AMERICAN CITIZENS ARE BEING CENSORED, KEPT IN THE DARK, AND LIED TO, AND THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
COPIED EPA CLIMATE CHANGE DATA

As you know the EPA is being censored and systematically dismantled. I decided to spend a few days copying the EPA climate change data verbatim before it disappears for good. This includes text, images, graphs, and tables. The data is now uploaded in a very readable and user friendly form to this site. You would think there is no reason to do this, since no doubt, all climate scientists from the EPA, NASA, NOAA, are all rushing to make backup copies of the climate change pages. You might also be thinking this project is pretty anal, even for me, but there is a method to my madness. The reasons for going to all this trouble is as follows:
  • The climate change data represents years of detailed research by dedicated scientists across the globe and should not be discarded./li>
  • This information was paid for by, and made for, the general public, and should always be available for discussion, debate, and for making policy decisions. Keep in mind that climate change and global warming denial is the prerogative of every human, while the deletion of scientific data, is a crime against humanity.
  • Keeping this EPA climate change information online and publicly accessible will serve as a benchmark to be used to compare at what level the EPA information is being changed and or deleted.
  • The climate change information on the EPA website is presented in a scientific, yet simple enough manner, that even those without a science background, can easily understand the forces affecting the atmosphere of our planet.
FYI, information on government sites is considered to be public domain and not subject to copyright laws. And yes, of course, I made a print screen of all pertinent EPA copyright information. No doubt Trump will put changing the access to all government site information on his things to slam list.

Anyway, the links to the climate change pages on this site, along with links to the same pages on the EPA site will be posted soon. Please use these links to compare the data on this site with the data on the EPA site and post a comment on any page where the data on the EPA site has been changed and does not match.

WE ALL NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME NOW
 
Additional Reading